The Dark Knight

The Dark Knight

Dark Knight, Killer Katherine, The Carnivore Killer. She goes by many names, but Katherine Knight is one thing to many people, locked in the history books as the first Australian woman to be sentenced to life without parole.

Knight was convicted of the murder of her partner and father of two, John Charles Thomas Price, or Pricey to friends, in October 2001. It is, to this day, considered one of the nation’s most brutal murder scenes.

Born in 1955, Knight was known from a young age for flying randomly into murderous rages. Whilst she appeared a model student on her good days, those around her knew she was equally capable of violent acts without notice.

After leaving school at 16, Knight scored her ‘dream job’ working in an abattoir. She prided herself on her adept skills with a knife, unnerving co-workers with her grotesque interest in watching them slit the throats of animals. Knight became so obsessed with her job that she began to sleep with her knives hanging above her bed.

On her wedding night, she attempted to strangle her first husband because he only had sex with her three times before falling asleep. In another incident, Knight burned all of his clothing and hit him across the head with a frying pan because he had arrived home late.

After he left her, Knight went on a rampage through the streets, abandoning her young baby on the local railway tracks and walking the streets wielding an axe. Later that night she even went as far as to slash the face of a woman, demanding she drive Knight to her husband, who was now living interstate.

Knight’s displays of violence only worsened when she met her next partner, slitting his puppy’s throat as a power play and hitting him over the head with a frying pan, shortly after he had moved in with her and her two daughters. The birth of her third baby helped her score a deposit on  a house, which she decorated from floor to ceiling in animal hides, skulls, rusty animal traps, machetes and other horrifying paraphernalia. During this time, she again hit her partner (this time with an iron in the face) and stabbed him with a pair of scissors.

Although Knight’s past was full of violence, it was not for another 10 years, another child and two relationships later that her crimes turned murderous.

Her new lover, John Price, suffered through a series of assaults by Knight, including being stabbed in the chest before he decided to leave her, taking out a restraining order. On the day of his death, he had warned his co-workers that if he did not show for work the next day, Knight would have likely killed him. And that is precisely what she did.

After arriving home late, Knight seduced Price before leaping into a deadly rage. She stabbed Price with a butcher’s knife while he slept, hacking his body 37 times. Despite his attempts to escape, Price died from his wounds. Knight then skinned his entire body, hung the skin from a doorframe and dismembered his remains, cooking his head and the flesh of his buttocks with vegetables and gravy. She then served two plates of her lover (intended for Price’s two children), and made a plate for herself.

In 2001, Knight was found guilty of the murder of Price and made history when the judged refused her parole, making her the only woman in Australian history to have “never to be released” stamped upon her prison papers.

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